Dialysis Acceptance
After dialysis changed the shape of his arm, my friend Jonathan suggested this project to help him come to terms with his new bumps.
It was meant to be a series, as his feelings evolved.
Unpainted
When you’ve been repeatedly poked by big dialysis needles, your veins grow permanent bulges. There’s a “fistula” in there where a vein and artery have been surgically connected so the blood can be taken out, purified, and put back in. He jokes that it looks like mountainous Highway 17!
Jonathan wanted our first painting to express his discomfort with the shape of his arm. He felt that his arm looked weird and embarrassing, as well as representing the physical pain and difficult lifestyle changes that go with dialysis.
Disgust
We chose metallic blue-grey paint, since that felt most “alien” to him. I created the illusion of a hole in his arm that this new “being” could ooze out of. This is how he was seeing his arm at that point.
Curiosity and Wonder
The second painting is more Matter-of-Fact. We were considering the mechanics of how his blood gets purified, as he is hooked up to the dialysis machine, keeping him alive since his kidneys aren’t functioning.
We brainstormed together, I did some research, and we came up with a theme of Waterworks: like the way our municipal wastewater gets filtered and reclaimed.
Here’s what we came up with. Blue for blood from the vein, red for cleaned blood going into the artery, and the yellow turnaround where the fistula connects them:
Jonathan is a wonderful musician and sound effects person. So he had a great whizzing kazoo-like sound for what the yellow part of this painted machine would do, which is based on the vibration he actually feels in his arm as the blood passes through the vein closest to the surface. (I think it’s pretty cool— when you touch this part of his arm, it feels almost electric)
As this series continued (and his bumps got bigger), we decided that what he needed amongst the rough road of the dialysis lifestyle was
FUN! …
A fire-breathing dragon, to keep the painful things at bay
A feline friend to be encouraging company on a nerve-wracking day
And finally, some festive armadillos, in the Mexican alebrije style! Because doesn’t it seem like you’d like a shell to retreat into when someone’s coming to poke a needle into you? And still there’s plenty of color and fancifulness to enjoy life with. This one was painted in a way that it could be enjoyed from all sides.
Know some organization that might like to sponsor work like this? Please let me know.